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Jon Kedrowski spends a night on all of Colorado's fourteeners

Jon Kedrowski, above, joined co-author Chris Tomer in speaking about their book "Sleeping on the Summits: Colorado Fourteener High Bivys" during a signing. (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post)

There are all sorts of firsts associated with Colorado's fourteeners. First to climb them all? Carl Blaurock and Bill Ervin, 1923. First to ski them all? Lou Dawson, 1991. One of these days someone is going to become the first to climb them all in alphabetical order.

Jon Kedrowski of Vail climbed them all in a way that might be the coolest yet. He became the first to spend the night on the summit of every one, climbing 58 peaks in 95 days in 2011, in part as training for a trip to Mount Everest. A year ago, he produced a book from that remarkable feat, "Sleeping on the Summits: Colorado Fourteener High Bivys."

Kedrowski had a rule for the summit to count: He had to be on top for the sunset and the sunrise. You can imagine the sort of photographs that afforded: spectacular.

There wasn't much room for a tent on the 14,084-foot summit of Mount Eolus in southwest Colorado, but Jon Kedrowski managed to make it work. (Courtesy of Jon Kedrowski)

"It is like a magical time," Kedrowski said of the sunrises he mostly experienced alone. "The light's always different, every day. And the calmness sometimes, the solitude, you're just all by yourself. It's very stress free, very stress relieving. Calm. Peaceful."

His adventure did have hair-raising moments, however.

Kedrowski is lucky to be alive after what happened to him on Mount Harvard, where he believes he was saved by a miracle. Or two.

At about 9:30 p.m., just before he was about to turn off his cellphone for the night to save the battery, his mother called to check on him. If she hadn't called, he believes he would have been asleep when a rogue thunderstorm struck.

"I feel like a flash, like, 'Flash-boom!' I look out and it was hailing," said Kedrowski, 33. "Rocks were starting to light up. As soon as I heard that, I was like, 'Mom, I've got to go!' I hung up on her."

Kedrowski grabbed his pack and jacket, slipped on his hiking boots and fled the tent in a desperate bid to get off the summit, accidentally leaving his headlamp behind. He saw sparks on the summit rocks.

"That's when I saw the angel," Kedrowski said. "Everything was lit up like an airport runway."

Yes, an angel.

"It was just like a figure sitting on rock," said Kedrowski, who has a Ph.D. in geography. "It was pointing the right way. Once I got down that part, it was gone, but I was kind of guided down by light."

And not a moment too soon. When he was about 50 yards from the summit, lightning struck his tent. He could feel the heat of the strike.

"That knocked me onto the ground," Kedrowski said. "It was like a war zone. There were a few more strikes, and I fell one more time, kind of smacked my shin on a rock."

Kedrowski shudders to think what would have happened if his mother hadn't called when she did.

"She saved my life, because if I would have fallen asleep or laid down and tried to sleep, the lightning would have hit the tent and I probably would have been baked in there," Kedrowski said.

After the storm moved away and the stars came out, Kedrowski returned to the summit. He found the charred remains of his headlamp in the tent. Tent poles had melted.

That experience notwithstanding, Kedrowski had a lot of help navigating the weather. KDVR- and KWGN-TV meteorologist Chris Tomer kept an eye on weather radar for him, advising him when to go for the summit and when it was too risky. On 10 occasions, Tomer joined Kedrowski on his climbs.

But, as his experience on Harvard showed, there are no guarantees.

"I took calculated risks," Kedrowski said. "If the sun set at 7 p.m., and I knew I could climb, say, Pyramid Peak in four hours, then I would leave a little before 3 o'clock to get up to the top in time to put my tent up and get the photos I needed. That would minimize my risk, I would only be up near the summit for a few hours, the most critical times before the sun went down when maybe storms could hit."

His adventure began June 23 on La Plata Peak and ended Sept. 28 on Mount of the Holy Cross.

The climbs were good preparation for Everest, both from a conditioning standpoint and for acclimatization, and it paid off when Kedrowski reached the summit of Everest last May. Now he's planning a "sequel" to the "Sleeping on the Summits." Next week he leaves for California, where he plans to sleep on that state's 12 fourteeners. After that, his new project will include stays on volcanic mountains in the Pacific Northwest.

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